Brexiteers should be ashamed of their attacks on Olly Robbins

There are many good reasons for welcoming the appointment of Sir Oliver Robbins as the new permanent secretary at the Foreign Office. He is vastly experienced, he is firmly wedded to the traditions of the civil service – impartiality, honesty and dedication. He has worked in the private sector, has decades of experience in foreign and security matters, and most importantly of all; his appointment will drive the Brexiteers absolutely mad.

It was Sir Olly who was Theresa May’s chief negotiator for Brexit, which brought him little but hatred and vitriol from the swivel-eyed loons who thought that May’s government was betraying their pipe dream of a complete break from the EU. They should have been careful what they wished for because after May was destroyed by Brexit they got Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Lord Frost instead, who made the Three Stooges look like international statesmen.

Between them they managed to put a border down the Irish Sea, split the UK apart economically, got no any meaningful cooperation with the EU, consigned us to following EU rules and regulations with no say on their introduction, put endless red tape and expense in the way of British industry and put checks at the border with the EU (with more to come). They then negotiated a series of incompetent and economically irrelevant trade treaties with the likes of New Zealand and Australia which will do lasting damage to the British farming industry.

It is not difficult to look like a titan of international diplomacy when you are followed by those three, but Sir Olly’s brave attempts to do the impossible and square the circle of Brexit led to some Tory MPs blaming him for an anti-Brexit “establishment plot”. He even had to be defended at the time by the head of the civil service who praised his professionalism and said those abusing him “should be ashamed of themselves.”

Nothing much seems to have changed with the Daily Mail announcing the appointment of “May’s Brexit bungler in chief”, the man who they claim “wasn’t tough enough with Brussels”. While the Daily Express goes even further and seems to have found some dinosaurs to claim “Brexiteers accused Sir Keir Starmer of plotting to drag Britain back into the EU after appointed a “Europhile” to run the Foreign Office.” Mark Francois even managed to tell the paper that one of the problems with Sir Olly’s appointment was that he “is well connected around the EU.”

I mean, what are the government thinking? Appointing someone who is “well connected”, when the obvious choice would be a xenophobic, racist, jingoistic, monoglot hermit who has never been abroad, couldn’t find Brussels on a map and detests the smell of garlic.

The appointment of Sir Olly is however not just good news because it annoys the Mark Francois’s of this world. It also underlines their complete paranoia, their lack of confidence in their project and its sustainability and the complete lack of knowledge of how international diplomacy really works.

Sir Olly is taking over the Foreign Office at a time of radical change in international politics. We need all the experience, knowledge and contacts he can bring to the job.

He has to deal with not just the mess that the Tories made of Brexit, but a Trump presidency, China, Ukraine and the Middle East, among many other things.

I wish he had the time and the power to take us back into the EU, but he has neither. He is just an experienced and knowledgeable civil servant returning to serve his country.

It says everything you need to know about the Brexit mob that even that leaves them spitting blood.